View excerpts of the 2014 Q & A session with Tony Award winning playwright David Henry Hwang on youtube.

The Philadelphia Constantinidis Essay

in Critical Theory Award

The $1000 Philadelphia Constantinidis Essay in Critical Theory Award will be given to the best comparative essay on any aspect and period of Greek drama or theatre that was published in English in any journal or anthology in any country between January 1 and December 31 in the prior year. The award was established in 2006 in memory of Philadelphia Constantinidis to encourage research and writing on Greek drama and theatre. This is an open rank competition for academics, independent scholars, and doctoral students. The award is administered by the Board of the Comparative Drama Conference. The Board solicits nominations and self-nominations for this award. The winner will be notified by the Director of the Comparative Drama Conference, and will be offered complimentary hotel accommodations and a registration fee waiver to attend the Comparative Drama Conference.

The winner will also receive a check of one thousand dollars ($1,000) during the awards ceremony. The deadline for nominations is December 31, 2015. Nominating letters and electronic copies of the essays (converted to Adobe PDF) should be emailed to The Constantinidis Award Committee, Chair Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., at Kevin.Wetmore@lmu.edu‎. Postal mail and faxes are not acceptable. The letter of nomination should include the name of the author of the published essay, the title of the essay, the year of publication, the name of the journal, the email address and postal address of the author, and a brief statement explaining why this essay was chosen for nomination. Recipients of the award are not eligible for nomination for a three year period.

Philadelphia A. Constantinidis

Philadelphia A. Constantinidis (1912-1982), was born in Artaki, lived in Thessaloniki, and died in Athens. She was the youngest child of a wealthy merchant who lost everything that he owned when the Greek-Anatolians were driven out of their homeland in 1922. She was a survivor of the First World War, the Greek-Turkish war, the Second World War, and the Greek Civil War. Her husband died from an old wound in 1950 and she raised her two sons alone. Her oldest son was killed in 1983. She often expressed her philosophy of life with a quote from a Greek play: “ἄνδρα δ᾽ ὠφελεῖν ἐφ᾽ ὧν ἔχοι τε καὶ δύναιτο κάλλιστος πόνων” (ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ ΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΣ, 314-315). She occasionally replaced the word “ἄνδρα” (man) with the word “γυνή” (woman).